Tuesday, June 5 @ 7:30 PMHANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSENDirected by Charles Vidor • 1952
Danny Kaye, here at his very best, plays Hans Christian Andersen in this not-biopic, a gorgeous Technicolor musical which has next to no relation to the much-stranger-in-real-life man behind The Ugly Duckling and The Red Shoes. Exiled from his hometown of Odense, Denmark, for corrupting the minds of school children with fables, Andersen and his assistant cobbler Peter leave for Copenhagen, quickly driven to distraction by the French Ballerina Zizi Jeanmaire. Babyface Farley Granger plays the brutish ballet producer, though he doesn’t turn out to be such a bad guy. A pet project of producer Samuel Goldwyn, the film was in pre-production for fourteen years and went through sixteen different screenplays before it was finally produced. The trailer boasted that Goldwyn had never spent so many millions, and it even caused an international dispute when the people of Denmark feared their hero was being disgraced by this American mega-production. (Kaye himself was sent to smooth things over.) Happily, the money shows up on screen: beautiful, lavish sets and costumes, a delightful and luxurious twenty-minute ballet sequence, and eight perpetually hummable musical numbers, all in glorious Technicolor. (JA)
112 min • Samuel Goldwyn • 35mm IB Technicolor from private collections, permission Park CircusShort: “Alice in Wonderland: Act II” (Ruth Page, 1977) – 7 min – 16mm from Chicago Film Archives

Saturday, June 16 @ 11:30 AM FEEL MY PULSEDirected by Gregory La Cava • 1928Live Organ Accompaniment from Dennis Scott
Bebe Daniels began her acting career at the age of seven; by fourteen, she was a frequent co-star of Harold Lloyd, with whom she made dozens of comedies under the “Lonesome Luke” banner. Towards the end of the silent era, Daniels had become a star and accomplished comedienne in her own right, though many of her most intriguing and subversive films from this period (e.g., She’s a Sheik) are now presumed lost. Among the handful that survive, Feel My Pulse is a rollicking comedy that offers Daniels a wonderful showcase for her knockabout antics and subtler character work. Directed by former cartoonist Gregory La Cava, who also fashioned a surprisingly effective silent comedian out of W.C. Fields in So’s Your Old Man and Running Wild, Feel My Pulse follows hypochondriac heiress Daniels to an island sanitarium where everything is not as it seems. The doctor (William Powell) is really a bootlegger in disguise and all the attendants, save for undercover reporter Richard Arlen, are lieutenants in his rum-running army. The kind of witty and unpretentious comedy at which Paramount excelled, Feel My Pulse never aspired to be anything more than an evening’s entertainment — but after seeing it, you’ll never look at surgical equipment the same way again. (KW)
63 min • Paramount Pictures • 35mm from Library of CongressShort: “The Hasher’s Delirium” (Émile Cohl, 1910) – 5 min – 16mm